We sip the flood that drowns us, inevitably.

Stepping on stones that are no longer there. The choice creations
we have actively creatively compared. I first drew a duck on the
back of an brylcreemed primary school photograph with a thick
pencil.

I remember sitting locked in the bathroom reading Robinson Crusoe
all day. One of the few presents I got. All with thorns. I
remember Walter De la Mare and quinqurimes from Nineveh in an old
maids classroom. We have all the time in the world. To caress
cross our bravery and meet our makers. Locked tight in huge
families of cotton and cold coal.

And onward to study the remains of this year of days locked again
repeating as parrots with no understanding. To education that no
one could see the value of but me and the old man down the road.
Getting a world of trouble because I could not cut a straight
line. And later...

Loving too much to break down for ever with a syringe in the base
of a spineless spine. Only one moment in forever. Please my
helplessness hit me so I may focus. The Doctor, I don't want to
feel this way forever. A lost month of wishes not wanting to cry
any more. Don't, continued the Doctor, read that, read this. A
choice between Joyce and the x-ray specs in the back of Superman.

And everybody has got to learn this in this way as the mellotron
played. Strike the chords and wonder if you will get home from
self imposed exile in your France.

The green woodpeckers of the gypsies and the black potatoes and
mint they fed us. A single chord on a church organ shines frosted
coloured through the window dedicated to St Michael. A Gauguin
Christ lowered in yellow fields. Straw hat drunk in the marshes
of the south. The crows of San Remy in homage painted later in
loved colours. A woman singing in a bedroom above the street.

The same one in a Loire scullery stripped and asking if I liked
in flawless English. Of course I did. Oh I did, it was forgetting
that was the problem. Yes was way and Ampereheure bien, je vous
connais maintenant, was all you said at the end.